Apple's first major iOS 7 update makes the operating system feel whole.

There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order.

iOS 7.1's version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release.

We've spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we're here to pick through the minutiae so you don't have to. iOS 7.1 isn't a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts.

Performance

Further Reading

iOS 7.1 doesn't improve benchmark scores relative to iOS 7, but it still introduces a small but significant change that will make all iOS devices feel much faster. The animation durations that we complained about in the original release have all been significantly shortened, and that by itself is enough to relieve much of iOS 7's sluggishness. Some of the slower iOS devices used these animations to mask application load times, but on faster hardware, the animations almost always took longer to complete than the app took to start up.

iOS 7.0.3 was a first step toward fixing this issue for people who knew which settings to tweak. Going into the Accessibility Options and toggling "reduce motion" originally just disabled the parallax effect used on the home screen and throughout the operating system, but version 7.0.3 also disabled the sweeping animations used to transition from app to app. In its place was a crossfade effect that was less flashy but demonstrably faster.

iOS 7.0.6 and iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 5. The faster animations make the OS feel zippier. Music credit: "Pinball Spring" by Kevin MacLeod.

iOS 7.0.6 and iOS 7.1 on a first-generation iPad mini. Notice both the faster animations and the revised, cleaner pinch-to-Home animation. Music credit: "Show Your Moves" by Kevin MacLeod.

iOS 7.1 solves this problem for people who don't tweak their devices' settings or for people who like the way the animations look but not how they feel. The "reduce motion" setting still kills these animations in iOS 7.1, but the change is now purely cosmetic and offers no performance benefit.

Otherwise, iOS 7.1 remains fluid and usable even on older Apple A5-based devices like the iPhone 4S, fifth-generation iPod Touch, and the original iPad Mini. There are some actions that consistently produce stutters or dropped frames, and you'll notice a big step up if you move from something with an A5 in it to something with an A7 in it. Still, the experience is significantly better than it is on the iPhone 4 (though even the iPhone 4 behaves better under iOS 7.1, as we've examined in this separate post).

Battery life

Note: these scores are not comparable to the scores in the iOS 7.0 review. The test has been modified since then.

In the move from iOS 6.1 to iOS 7.0, we observed a statistically significant drop in battery life—the iPhone 5 was the biggest loser, while everything else was down just a little bit. The move from iOS 7.0 to 7.1 doesn't make as much of a difference. Our Wi-Fi browsing test measured both small gains and small losses, but most of these scores are different by just two or three percent, which we'd consider to be within the margin of error.

The first-generation iPad mini is the only one to lose a significant amount of runtime in our test—it gets about 10 percent less life out of a single charge. We'll be running the test again to verify this particular data and will update this article if we see different results. In the meantime, it's probably safe to say that unless something is wrong with your hardware, you'll get about the same battery life out of iOS 7.1 that you got from 7.0.

Stability improvements

Apple's release notes say that iOS 7.1 fixes crashing problems for iPhone 5S users, the same crashes that the company commented on way back in January. It's rare for Apple to acknowledge these kinds of problems beforehand or to promise fixes ahead of time, so the company must be confident that the problem has been fixed.

What Apple doesn't mention is that similar crashes have also affected both the iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. The common factor here is the new 64-bit A7 chip, which on these three devices runs a 64-bit build of iOS and 64-bit versions of all of Apple's built-in apps (and a small-but-growing number of third-party ones). These 64-bit apps can be expected to consume around 20 or 30 percent more memory than their 32-bit counterparts, but the iPhone 5S and both 64-bit iPads both ship with the same 1GB of RAM that their predecessors did.

The results were predictable: crashes on both the iPhone 5S and the 64-bit iPads are almost always associated with low memory errors. Pulling the logs from any given 64-bit iOS 7.0 device reveals at least a few of these crashes—below is the error list from Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson's iPhone 5S and a Retina iPad mini on loan from Apple. Both are running iOS 7.0.6.

Lee's log shows two low memory crashes in March, and the (intermittently used) iPad shows three since February 24. Anecdotal evidence from Twitter, the Apple Support Communities forums, and other sources suggest that some users are seeing even more frequent crashes than these. Here's the crash log from my own iPhone 5S, which has been running iOS 7.1 beta 5 since it came out at the beginning of February.

As if by magic, no crashes in 7.1.

Andrew Cunningham

Despite our best efforts to create a set of steps that would consistently crash 64-bit iPhones and iPads, we can't point to any one specific workflow as proof that things that crash in iOS 7.0 won't crash in 7.1. But 32-bit and 64-bit devices running the final build of iOS 7.1 and any of the later betas have been remarkably stable. Whatever it was that was causing newer iPhones and iPads to crash and reboot, Apple seems to have straightened it out in the last six months.

259 Reader Comments

It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release.

I disagree; I bet they've moved large swathes of the team onto iWatch and/or iOS 8, so 7.x updates are a far lower priority. There's no way that a great team takes almost 7 months to do these changes.

Does anyone else notice a difference with the tap recognizing for seeking through a track when your device is locked and is playing music? I remember before this last update that it was quite annoying to actually seek while on that screen but it seems to be pretty easy to do so now.

Everything is faster in iOS 7.1. Some of it is the animation timings, but Apple really did a great job here. It feels like a new phone.

And my 64GB iPad 2 with 250 apps was almost unusable before - laggy, unresponsive, crashing all the time with iOS 7.0. The update brought it to be amazingly responsive and took it once again to "new, usable device" state.

Admittedly part of the reason it's such a great update is that the initial iOS 7.0 was sort of weak in terms of performance and stability. However, it was a huge software project rewrite, and they delivered it on-time, so I have to give them credit for that. If you're in real-world software engineering, you know how hard that is to do.

They also sadly removed the amazing UIDynamics "bounce to open camera" where you could throw the camera lock screen handle down hard enough to get it to bounce past where you had it, and open/unlock the camera.

Now it is boring and more like iOS 6. They turned the spring padding WAY up I guess. Oh well.

(I also don't like the new shift keys but the back and forth on that online has been already hashed out ad nauseum over the last months)

I put it on my iPhone 4 and it has made it more usable again, not quiet iOS 6 speed but it will do.Everything does seem smoother and has more polish.While not covered the screen that appears when you start a call looks very nice.

It did take me a while to get the UI looking well again.I had to disable some of the tweaks such as turn off bold fonts, and turn off Increased Contrast.I have to say the fonts are much more pleasing on the eye.

Two of the biggest issues I (and a lot of others) have have not been addressed.1. Siri is god awful slow. I still don't understand why it was architected this way. Why, when I want to call someone in my address book does that command need to be sent to apple's servers? I have good to great LTE speed here. It shouldn't take the phone 5 to 10 seconds to dial a number in my contacts. Generally speaking I find Siri to be of little use in it's current crude form when it seems like it could be great.2. TouchID. I, and a lot of others suffer from fingerprint rot in TouchID. After reprogramming the thing in various ways 4 times I have given up, but it's definitely a software issue, not a hardware issue.

Note that I'm very much on the Apple team. We use Macs, and iOS devices exclusively and I'm just pointing out some negatives. I just don't understand why they can't get this stuff right. I will avoid discussing iCloud, and the horrible iTunes software, to keep things light.

Wallpaper on the iPads are broken. In 7.0.x, it would way overzoom wallpapers unless you turned on "Reduce Motion" (turn off parallax). Now it overzooms even with this setting on. But only on some images.

Apple, can I get a the simple 1 pixel to 1 pixel wallpaper mapping mode back?

And PLEASE bring back the landscape interface for the Music App. A sea of thumbnail covers of albums I'm *not* listening to is useless.

Two of the biggest issues I (and a lot of others) have have not been addressed.1. Siri is god awful slow. I still don't understand why it was architected this way. Why, when I want to call someone in my address book does that command need to be sent to apple's servers?.

This is especially frustrating since before Siri there was "voice control", which worked 100% on the device!

Quote:

2. TouchID. I, and a lot of others suffer from fingerprint rot in TouchID. After reprogramming the thing in various ways 4 times I have given up, but it's definitely a software issue, not a hardware issue.

That was supposed to have been addressed, but I am still having trouble with it and have turned it off again...

I have an iPad. I genuinely like it and prefer it over every other tablet (except the Surface Pro 2; and I love that little 7" Venue Pro). But it has become a toy. Apple, please steal:

- Android intents- Metro split windows and snap- Expose and let us use SOME sort of filesystem! (I know you're demographic--you don't want to confuse them--so make it under some scary sounding name in settings so your average user doesn't touch it)

This is 2014. I shouldn't have to email myself a simple spreadsheet to edit it. I can't even edit a simple document letter if it's in cloud storage. And no, I'm not going to give some random app my cloud storage password as a workaround. It's a few simple things that we've had for 50 years that is the defining feature of making computers useful.

Hell, introduce it as some "magical" feature with iOS 8 and correspond it with the launch of the iPhone 6. I don't care. Just do it. As it stands, I want another iDevice, but I won't buy another. I won't spend $500 on a toy.

Please Apple, I really don't want a Samsung Note 10.1.

P.S. That said, how it Fedora or Ubuntu on a touch screen? Work as well as Windows 8 (preference of OS aside) at least touch responsive-wise?

Wallpaper on the iPads are broken. In 7.0.x, it would way overzoom wallpapers unless you turned on "Reduce Motion" (turn off parallax). Now it overzooms even with this setting on. But only on some images.

Apple, can I get a the simple 1 pixel to 1 pixel wallpaper mapping mode back?

This is one of the new features in 7.1.

Wallpaper parallax is now independent of the Reduce Motion setting. Just set your wallpaper again and turn "Perspective Zoom" off to get back to 1:1 pixel.

I was really, REALLY hoping they'd fix the hideously broken Podcasts app. I'll test it specifically for this version, but nothing in the notes suggests that they've fixed anything major (including sorting/grouping issues, mark as played, screwing up sync status, etc.)

Podcast.app is exactly as bad as it was before. Sync randomly decides when to work and when not to work. I still can't figure out why it's so hard for them to just make the sync functionality work as advertised.

Thats a little disapointing, I was looking forward to having a dark keyboard setting on my phone.

The rest of the udpate looks pretty solid though.

I'm hoping Apple will bring back limited local Siri functionality. Sometimes it cant connect to translate my commands, but all im trying to do is place a call. Hearing 'There's something wrong' all the time gets old fast. But I'm guessing Apple probably won't mess with Siri in a meangingful way til iOS8.

Wallpaper parallax is now independent of the Reduce Motion setting. Just set your wallpaper again and turn "Perspective Zoom" off to get back to 1:1 pixel.

Did that. Still zooms. The size of the wallpaper seems to have an effect. Some zoom and some don't regardless of the setting. I dunno... I've been tending to use simple, subtle gradient backgrounds these days so maybe it doesn't matter.

One of the first things I did after upgrading was to switch on button shapes. For me, the iOS7 'buttons' (basically, clickable labels) were a huge UI mistake.

I hate the clickable labels. And I hate the look of the new button shapes. It's almost like Apple said "we think clickable words are better. We'll give you button shapes if you want, but we're going to make them ugly to discourage you from using them."

7.1 is worth the upgrade so far, but the new shift key look and behavior is throwing me off. I can never feel certain whether it's on or off, especially when it insists on shifting for you (e.g. when creating new folders). But that said that's the only change I've seen so far that I'd seriously want rolled back.

7.1 is worth the upgrade so far, but the new shift key look and behavior is throwing me off. I can never feel certain whether it's on or off, especially when it insists on shifting for you (e.g. when creating new folders). But that said that's the only change I've seen so far that I'd seriously want rolled back.

only trouble that i'd had as well, can't read the shift key. thought it was perfectly fine before.

Two of the biggest issues I (and a lot of others) have have not been addressed.1. Siri is god awful slow. I still don't understand why it was architected this way. Why, when I want to call someone in my address book does that command need to be sent to apple's servers? I have good to great LTE speed here. It shouldn't take the phone 5 to 10 seconds to dial a number in my contacts. Generally speaking I find Siri to be of little use in it's current crude form when it seems like it could be great.2. TouchID. I, and a lot of others suffer from fingerprint rot in TouchID. After reprogramming the thing in various ways 4 times I have given up, but it's definitely a software issue, not a hardware issue.

Note that I'm very much on the Apple team. We use Macs, and iOS devices exclusively and I'm just pointing out some negatives. I just don't understand why they can't get this stuff right. I will avoid discussing iCloud, and the horrible iTunes software, to keep things light.

Wow, 5 to 10 seconds?

I've found Siri to be faster than me!

1) Press home button2) "Siri, Call X"

as opposed to:1) Press home button2) Slide to unlock3) Press home button to exit current app4) Open phone app5) Tap contacts button6) Scroll to desired contact7) Tap on phone number to call

The real benefit of Siri however is in hands free use while walking or in the car, though.